Desilencing Complexities: Addressing Categorization in Cross-Cultural Management with Intersectionality and Relationality

Abstract

A central focus of cross-cultural management research is how individuals and organizations differ across national cultures and how that fundamentally shapes their thoughts and actions and serves as a unit of identification. In this article, we critically reconsider the essential categorical nature of culture, problematizing categorization and questioning national culture as the primary basis of differentiation. We draw on intersectionality, an approach that helps understand how multiple categories are experienced by the individual, and on relationality, an approach that conceptualizes people, organizations, and their actions within dynamic patterns of relations and cultural meanings. Both approaches challenge the primacy, unity, and separateness of any given category, the a priori determination of categories (and associated boundaries) in research, and the nature and stability of boundaries. Based on this we advance notions of boundary work and boundary shifting that help explore how today’s sociocultural groups and categories, and the boundaries that separate them, emerge and change. We conclude that, while the extant cross-cultural literature has come far in identifying differences, relationality and intersectionality can enable cross-cultural scholars to engage in research practice that better reflects the complexities of sociocultural life. We contribute to theory by suggesting why and how these two approaches can be used to explore complex cross-cultural management phenomena.